No Apologies Necessary When a Dish Goes Awry

MANY years ago, I saw a photo of braised Provençal duck in a food magazine. It was stunning, with bronzed pieces of duck nestled in sauce studded with olives and potatoes.

I made it for a dinner party. Instead of a culinary masterpiece, I was left with a soupy pot of pale duck bobbing under a slick of its own liquefied fat.

Had the same thing happened to me today, I would have simply changed the name of the dish to “duck confit with potatoes and olives.” If people were expecting that layer of fat, it wouldn’t have bothered them. Or if I wanted to get fancy, I could translate the whole thing into French.

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Oops Trifle Parfaits.Credit
Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

But for years, I didn’t realize that was an option. And when I served the duck, which was tasty despite its appearance, I spent a good chunk of the evening explaining, apologizing and generally agonizing over the homely thing. I know I’m not the only one who’s done that. Inundated by food porn in cookbooks and magazines, and on online, and on food TV, a whole generation of home cooks has become caught up in the Cult of Foodie Perfectionism. It’s the desire for perfection, however unconscious, that causes many otherwise practical cooks to think they must recreate entire meals — amuse-bouches to petits fours — from, say, the Alinea cookbook, when one dish would have sufficed. And perfectionism can breed performance anxiety, a cloud hovering over the kitchen counter. Sometimes I wonder if home cooks put so much pressure on themselves that they become reluctant to have friends over for dinner at all.

Will my soufflé rise as high as Thomas Keller’s? Will my terrine be as jewel-like as Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s, my cakes as luscious as Nancy Silverton’s?

That anxiety can harden into a sense of failure even if you didn’t shoot for the culinary heavens, as you fret over the fact that your preschooler’s birthday cupcakes weren’t quite as pretty as Martha Stewart’s, or that your blueberry pie filling bubbled over, destroying the look of your lattice top.

If this sounds familiar, then you know that the urge to apologize runs deep.

But don’t.

After all, you’ve just invited your friends into your home and cooked them dinner. They are happy to be there, basking in your generosity. They don’t care if the roast is a tad dry, or the vegetables a bit soggy, or if your duck looks as if it waded into a coastal oil spill.

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Rescue the Vegetables Soufflé.Credit
Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

Instead, pour yourself a glass of wine and re-evaluate the situation.

If the dish looks funny but tastes fine, the solution is easy: rename it. Over the years, I’ve served my guests “blackened carrot salad” (I added pomegranate molasses too early when roasting the roots), “melting, garlicky green beans” (I forgot about them on the stove and they almost dissolved), “molten fudge brownies” (underbaked, that is). Butterscotch pudding that never quite solidified in the fridge was rechristened butterscotch crème Anglaise, and poured over fruit.

I served all of this without apology. Since everything still tasted good (often better than intended), my guests thought that’s what I had been planning all along.

How do you think chocolate mud cake got its name? Probably from some cocoa experiment gone awry, but in a good way. And those Italian cookies called brutti ma buoni? It means ugly but good, a perfect way to manage expectations because the name says it all.

Of course, if the dish has truly failed in that you oversalted or -spiced it, or if you’ve overcooked the meat, or if the cake stuck to the bottom of the pan, you need to do a little more than just rename the thing. But it, too, can be saved.